Something has got to change if the Conservative Party is to thrive

The government reached the Parliamentary recess. But there was no skirl of the pipes, no uplift from the fifes and drums. It was more a matter of a bloodied boxer, battered and pummelled, clinging to the ropes, waiting for relief from the bell. This cannot go on. The Conservative party must find a way to regain momentum.

‘Momentum’ brings us to one of the Tories’ tasks. There is a group of that name spearheading the Corbynista take-over of the Labour party. Not all of them are pleasant people. Hate-filled, heavily infiltrated by the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP), they often use social media to intimidate their opponents. This ought to alarm sensible Corbyn supporters, if there are any. Sooner rather than later, those tactics will discredit those who employ them. But in the short-run, they are managing to give the impression that the Left has a monopoly of idealism: that you cannot be a caring Conservative.

In theory, that ought to be easy to counter, by reference to the actual record of Conservatives in government, especially the steady increases in spending on health, education and pensions. It might also be worth resurrecting Mrs Thatcher’s comment on the Good Samaritan. He was able to help, she said, not just because he had good intentions, but because he had money in his pocket. Benevolence is not enough. Unless free enterprise creates the resources, governments will be unable to fund improvements.

But there is a problem. Those are rational arguments and politics is not currently in a rational phase. There has been a quasi-religious intensity about much recent political debate, and not only in Britain. Happy the land that keeps religion and politics firmly apart. Britain is not currently a happy land.

That cannot be rectified fully until the outcome of Brexit is clearer. Yet there will have to be an interim strategy. If the Government spends the next two years in the Laocoon coils of Brexit, while the Tory party becomes more and more fractious and the Prime Minister is unable to to assert her leadership, there will be trouble. Although it is still impossible to imagine Jeremy Corbyn as Prime Minister, we are in a period when the gap between the impossible and the commonplace is constantly shrinking. Since 1951, every Government that lost a General Election had already lost its authority. The ballot-boxes merely ratified what had already happened.

To avoid a similar fate, the government faces the difficult task of rebuilding its authority, and the PM cannot do that on her own, irrespective of how long she stays in No.10. There ought to be a three-point strategy: the copy-book headings, intellectual energy and housing. Although rationality may not be enough, this does not mean that it could be discarded. In the run-up to the 1979 Election, Chris Patten came up with a terrific phrase: ‘the facts of life are Conservative.’ If most voters knew just how much the government was spending and borrowing, there would be much less enthusiasm for Corbynism. The Government needs to instruct the electorate in the economic facts of life. Then Kipling’s ‘Gods of the Copy-book Headings’ – Philip Hammond characters – will have more hope of a hearing.

Kipling himself knew the difficulty. Mankind was always ready to be seduced by flashier Gods, who seemed to possess what the eternal Philip Hammonds lacked: ‘Vision, Uplift and Breadth of Mind.’ As those attributes have a perennial appeal to the young, the Tories have to find a rival attraction and offer some uplift of their own.

That requires men even more than measures. The Tories need politicians who seem authentic, who use fresh-minted language and who never dumb down or talk down. This explains the extraordinary appeal of Jacob Rees-Mogg, who has become a one-man Tory momentum. He has shown that you do not have to be a populist in order to be popular. You merely have to be genuine.

Jacob is not alone. Below the Cabinet, the Tories have lots of talented individuals, who have not been in Parliament for long. Though they may be inexperienced, they are not jaded by experience. Half the present Cabinet’s political body language seems to be a matter of ‘after such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ There is none of that with the fresh troops. What follows is by no means an exhaustive list. But characters such as Jacob, of course, plus George Freeman, Matt Hancock, Kwasi Kwarteng, Brandon Lewis, Jesse Norman, Dominic Raab, Rory Stewart and Tom Tugendhat – reinforced by Ruth Davidson from North Britain – are a far stronger team of fresh political thinkers than anything the Labour benches could offer.

They need to be mobilised, perhaps by writing a mid-term manifesto. Their task is to persuade a confused public that the Tory party is full of ideas, and is the right home for practical idealists. Eventually, one of them will have the task of leading this revivified Party to the electoral victory which it should have won earlier this year. But before that can happen, one particular policy area must be weaponised. The enduring appeal of modern Toryism – the foundations of its political demography – is the property-owning democracy. The Tories have to find a way of offering the young the chance to buy a house. If the Party succeeds in this, it can and will win. If it fails, the God of the Copy-Book headings might as well flee the country.